The future of online learning

Great panel discussion on the Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning report.

I kept up with the discussion on the wikispace dedicated to the event which was a good discussion. A lot of information on virtual schools.

Web 2.0 in the Classroom

Here at the iNACOL Virtual Schools Symposium and it is THE highest energy education conference I have ever been to. These are the people that will transform education and it shows. Entrepreneurs working closely with outstanding educators with an incredible focus on students.

Yesterday I attended a Web 2.0 session and it was pretty cool. The number of tools available to teachers today is just outstanding. He demonstrated the following which can really bring any class to life:
GoAnimate.com - great way to animate
Xtranormal.com - text to video so cool
The Week in Rap - amazing current events
Moviestorm - 3D video
Wikispaces - great way for students to collaborate
LearnCentral - amazing teaching community

These are great ways to create improved learning – not just using technology for technology sake. And so very cool - -

Online Education Expansion

Great new online education statisitcs from iNACOL just updated in time for the conference.

K-12 Online Learning and Virtual Schools Expanding Options

• K-12 online learning is a new field consisting of an estimated
  $300 million market, which is growing at an estimated annual
  pace of 30% annually.
• 45 of the 50 states, plus Washington D.C., have a state virtual
  school or online initiative, full-time online schools, or both
• 24 states, as well as Washington, DC, have statewide full-time
  online schools.
• Many virtual schools show annual growth rates between 20 and
  45%
• 35 states have state virtual schools or state-led online programs.
• As of January 2007, there were 173 virtual charter schools
  serving 92,235 students in 18 states.
• 57% of public secondary schools in the U.S. provide access to
  students for online learning.
• 72% of school districts with distance education programs
  planned to expand online offerings in the coming year.
• 14.2 million computers were available for classroom use in the
  nation’s schools as of the 2005-2006 school year. That works out
  to one computer for every four students.

Scholarity is looking forward to being down in Austin and getting more great information on the impact of virtual classes!

Education Technology Fail

The “coolest education map ever” award has to go to the Leaders and Laggards report on education innovation from AEI, Center for American Progress and the Institute for a Competitive Workforce. Besides being very slick, it presents some interesting information on education innovation. It will be really cool to see if the billions spent actually move any of the state grades on innovation.

We care about technology so it is good to some of the states with strong technology in use scoring high. They used four indicators to rate states on technology and assigned a grade. The first was students per high speed Internet connected computer with 3 being the highest grade – so still not all that great. The second was an established virtual school (oh yeah!). The third was computer based assessment for students and the final indicator was requiring teachers to demonstrate technology competence (not mastery - let's just get some basic competence to start).

Only one technology fail which was Nevada. Sad as the requirements to pass were really low. A lot of states receiving a D including Washington and California - so the tech capitals of the US can’t put tech in their schools. Really sad. Other D states include Utah, Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, Kansas, Tennessee, Indiana, Alabama, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware and DC.

Hopefully this is a wake up call to these states and with all the money floating around they can at least get to average. Wow – striving for a C – that just doesn’t feel right.

Note: ABCTE just received a grant to create a course for using technology in the classroom! So give them a call to boost your tech grade.

Distance Learning Week

Apparently it is National Distance Learning Week! A great way to recognize the millions of students in the US who are studying online. Also kind of a nice way to build the excitement for the other online learning group, iNACOL, as they kick off their annual meeting.

Scholarity is looking forward to finding that forward thinking organization looking for a truly adaptive platform for their amazing content. Let us know if you would like a demo while you are at iNACOL.

iNACOL VSS

Always love the acronyms in education. But we are pretty excited to be heading down to San Antonio for the International Association for K12 Online Learning's Virtual School Symposium. Since Scholarity has developed state of the art education software to deliver a tutor like experience for students, we will be working to demonstrate this product to some of the great content providers at the conference. If you are interested, please let us know by going through the Scholarity site.

There is some great content and some great content management and even some great delivery. Combine those with dynamic insight technology and you could rule the web.

Drupal vs Joomla a cage match

One of the toughest things to stay on top of right now is our web strategy because everything changes so fast. What worked a year ago no longer works now. Creating websites in-house made sense but now it is so cheap that doing it with contractors seems to make more sense. Right now you can have a group design and launch a new website cheaper and faster than you coudl do it on your own and you can then maintain it in-house with the great tools that exist today.

Right now we have a mini-test going on to see two things;

• Is Joomla or Drupal better for us as an organization
• Does having a micro-site with a real purpose help traffic to our original site

So abcte.org is our core site for teacher certification and we just launched charterteacher.com to help charter school teachers and charter school leaders with professional development, teaching job searches and job postings as well as a forum for charter teachers.

We are deploying the full social media push as well as everything we have learned on SEO on this site as well as revamping our core site. Very excited to track the data to see how this will impact our future online strategy.